


Rose: Explore

by Duckface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-20
Updated: 2011-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-26 08:10:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duckface/pseuds/Duckface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where everything has largely sorted itself out, Rose and Kanaya ruin some furniture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rose: Explore

The dusty golden light of late afternoon, thick as sopor, oozes through the high-arched window of the turret sitting room. It puddles at the feet of Rose Lalonde, who is knitting. Across the faded oriental rug sits Kanaya Maryam, arranged with exacting delicacy in an overstuffed armchair. She is a lissome bundle of right angles and she reads by the light of her own skin. The click of needles, the rasp of a turning page; a dull rhythmic thudding from below, where John is enthusiastically failing to reupholster their freshly-acquired antique loveseat. These are the notes a companionable silence plays.

They are immortals together, and the one-up two-down Victorian they've chosen for themselves breathes age, the worn and pitted timber and ancient curtain-lace almost blotting out the new car smell of freshly minted universe. The house is, to put it charitably, cozy. They are fine with cozy. To those who have played the game, there is nothing enviable about mansions, and Rose had said that she could happily go an entire lifetime without setting foot in another van der Rohe monstrosity, and that she’d be happy to let Kanaya pick out the curtains, and the rugs, and the wallpaper, and the fiddly little window treatments in the pantry, and the trim, and the bedding, and the furniture.

And Kanaya is happy with all of it, perfectly happy, but this afternoon her eyes are sliding off the borrowed pages of Collette's "Mitsou" and drifting up to Rose's pale face, where she sits concentrating in the dusklight. In their private moments - together and apart, she suspects - they have considered growing old in this house. What will it be like to see the space conform around them, for the stairs to learn their tread, the banisters polished smooth by a million distracted caresses? Kanaya thinks of violet eyes grown milky and unsure with age, pushes the thought away, but it returns, over and over, creeping in through the words. Is death dealt by the slow passing of time just?

Is it heroic?

"Do you think it will be all right?”, she says.

She looks up again to meet those eyes. How long has Rose been staring? Her gaze is hard - frightening, comforting.

"What, with John? Absolutely. A can-do attitude will always triumph over a complete lack of experience, skill and hand-eye coordination. And he brought his own hammer."

"He is a man to be trusted when it comes to hammering, I suppose. The way he turns up when there is even the slightest possibility that something will need to be hammered verges on the uncanny." Rose rewards her with a fleeting smile and goes back to her knitting.

Kanaya’s eyes stray to the window again, to watch the first streaks of pink and gold appearing in the western sky. We got sunsets right, she thinks. None of the other trolls understood; how important it is, that moment when day begins to tip over into night, a time when everything can change if you push just the right way, if you just go out and stare and let yourself think thoughts the color of the turning sky. Rose knew – or did she know? The bright mocking sun on her tunic, her eyes hidden. It was so hard to tell. We held each other's hands, and thought of dusk, and passed through the gate, and now we're here and it's magnificent. Does it matter whose idea it was?

"Terezi is organizing a housewarming party for her and Karkat and Dave", she says, suddenly desperate to fill the silence. "That should be fun."

"I wouldn't miss it for the world." The needles glint in the gathering dim. "Are we taking bets on how long it's going to last?"

"It is obvious that Dave will move out first and it is also obvious that the Seer already knows this and is simply mining the present situation for interspecies makeouts."

"A precious commodity".

"Yes well I think she knows a good thing when she smells it. I feel in many ways the form of your species was created with our predilections in mind. Is that scarf going to be for him?"

Rose looks up, her face blank. "Him?"

"Dave. It's not really your color."

Rose picks up the trailing end of her knitting. It is light, and pink-red-yellow, and surprisingly gauzy for something made of yarn; Kanaya suspects that Rose has been messing around with wizard beard again. She holds it up to the light, casting deep purple shadows that thicken in the corners of the room.

"I realize that there is precedent for my perpetrating stealth yarn maneuvers on my unsuspecting brother, but no, this is not for him. And it's not a scarf. It's a sash." She's smiling again. Worrying. "I realize that I am stepping on your sartorial territory here, which is not unlike approaching an angry polar bear from its blind side, but it's for you. I thought it would go well with the green glow."

"Well that is a nice thought and very well executed and I am deeply moved but I am currently in fact trying to dress in such a way as to minimize the obviousness of the green glow as you put it because I think it tends to put people off." And it'll be a cold day on LOHAC before I will be seen in knitwear, she adds to herself. "But I find the gesture very touching, and-"

The room echoes suddenly with the unmistakable sound of a young man dropping an entire sofa on his foot. The silence that follows is a deep one. Kanaya feels her hands drifting to the hole in her belly, to the place where her insides ought to be. It’s a nothing – a coldness. It doesn’t bother her at all. It’s just the way the shadows move, light falling where there shouldn’t be light -

Rose lays down her needles with a sepulchral click.

"I think you pity me, Ms. Maryam", she says. There is nothing in her voice at all.

"Well of course I pity you, that is what matespritship is about", says Kanaya, nervously. "It's not just a thing that we say."

"I think", says Rose, rising slowly to her feet, "that you pity me a little too much. Why don't you try it on? The sash, I mean. You might be surprised."

"All right. Tell me when you're finished with it and I'll-"

"Now." Rose picks up her scissors from the bedside table and cuts the sash free of its trailing skein. There is something about the way the blades gleam in the dark, Kanaya thinks, something that suggests that it would be a very bad idea for her to take her eyes off them, even for a second. "I don't know if I am entirely comfortable with that idea", she says. She realizes that she is digging her shoulders further and further into the armchair’s plush depth.

"Why not? You've already made a thorough study of my human anatomy", Rose says. "Quite thorough. Exhaustive. Scientific, almost." She pulls Kanaya to her feet; there are times when the rainbow drinker's body feels like a bundle of steel girders, but she's light now, unresisting. "And I don't think I've ever so much as seen you without a shirt."

"You were the one who wanted to play heirs and horrorterrors", she says, weakly. She's squirming - squirming! She could break every bone in this woman's body! - as Rose reaches behind her, fingers underneath her turtleneck, searching for the stays of her newly alchemized corset. "I was just playing my part to the best of my ability. And anyway it's not... pleasant down there…"

"Then perhaps it will make me pity you", says Rose, shortly. "I feel that I've been letting the relationship down on that front. Hold still."

Rose is taking off her corset. Rose is lifting up her shirt, over the swell of her not-breasts. It has occurred to Kanaya that sexual differences in adult trolls, biologically meaningless as they are, must exist to ape the inhabitants of some previous universe - that the gods of the trolls, whoever played the session that created them, must have been basically mammalian, and the strength of their desire for each other shaped the voices and contours and curves and minds of the species they birthed. It’s a neat little joke, the way that this intergalactic legacy of heterosexual need has left her with a body that wants other bodies that curve and think and smell the way hers does.

It’s easier to think about that than to countenance what Rose's hands are doing. She feels warm fingers on her cool skin; and then-

"How do you stand up without a spine?"

Curiosity. She can handle that.

When the Prince of Hope punched her ticket to unlife, he left a neat circular hole in her belly. The rush of green blood that carried her old life away has long since ceased to flow, but the hole remains, glowing a lambent jade against the brilliant dazzle of her skin. Rose is down on one knee, peering through; she can dimly make out the paper on the far wall, with its green and gold fleurs-de-lis. "It's not quite like scar tissue," she says. "It's kind of like a sponge. What does it feel like?"

"Like an absence. It's not that important. Trolls are invertebrates", Kanaya says. Keep talking, keep talking, don’t think about it, don’t freeze up again! "Our skin is what makes our shape. Inside, we are largely blood with organs floating In It. Some of which are apparently not as essential as I thought. As they have yet to grow back. Or perhaps they have just moved around. Or something else is happening. What are you doing?"

“Relax.”

Kanaya feels Rose's finger lingering on the taut skin of her belly - and then nothing - and then a pressure, emanating from somewhere where there are no nerves to feel, just a change in shape, a stillness - "It's softer than I expected", says Rose - and then she feels it, and her knees buckle -

Rose catches her as she falls and settles her into the armchair, one hand still inside the glowing tunnel of her belly. "This... is the sort of thing one discusses first...", says Kanaya, her eyes refusing to focus. Rose is pressing down, pressing harder, one finger and then two slipping through the luminous walls of Kanaya's wound. "It's funny you should mention organs," she says, as green blood begins to pool around her knuckles. "I was talking to Karkat the other day about the ways in which male and female trolls differ, in his capacity as the resident anatomy expert of our happy little band. A delightful conversation for all concerned, as you can imagine. The things I do for you." Her fingers are up to the first knuckle, then the second. Kanaya's breath comes shallow, in short bursts, and her fingertips are tearing gashes in the armchair's upholstery. "Most of it was unhelpful, but he did mention something which he referred to as 'shame globes', which can't possibly be the correct term..." Rose is actively probing now, prodding, and Kanaya can feel the pressure everywhere, and it's something a little like pain, and a little like the feeling of metamorphosis between grub and troll, and a little like something else, some kind of sparking... "and he said that in male trolls they're quite near the surface, ready for handling, as it were, but with female trolls you have to go... deeper," and almost her entire hand is in now, and the tip of her finger hits something smooth and cool and firm, and Kanaya goes rigid and breaks the chair’s arm right off and groans so loudly that Rose nearly pulls away and then there's almost nothing, almost no sound at all, just the slow, quiet drip of green blood, trickling in streams down Rose's wrist and pooling on the floor.

A few minutes later, the silence is broken by the sound of hammering from below. It should not be possible for hammering to sound embarrassed, but it does.

Rose is moving her finger again, slowly, feeling the smoothness deep inside Kanaya's body. Her trembling. Her glow, brighter and brighter. "It doesn't matter what's going to happen", Rose whispers, her lips an inch from Kanaya's ear. "It doesn't matter how it ends. I'm a seer too, remember, and I haven't even bothered to look. You and I are doing something that has never been done before. We have bridged universes. We have walked with the dreaming dead. We have given birth to ourselves twice over. We have been present at the birth of an entire reality. We are currently engaged"... and here she plunges her hand further in, and _cups_ , and Kanaya breaks the chair's other arm to splinters... "in a sex act that has never, in the history of trollkind, been attempted. At least not while both parties were still conscious. We are explorers, Kanaya. Together. Death is nothing. Do you know how many times I've died? It's nothing. And when you look at me, I want you to remember that I am not just some mortal, some worldly scrap of blood and bone gone in a wink of your dread eternal dreaming. I am a worldly scrap of blood and bone who can do _this._ "

Their lips meet - white teeth tear redly at pink tongue - nails puncture skin - Rose's hand moves - Kanaya's back arches - the chair shatters, and from below, the Heir of Breath keeps time.

\---  
Later, in the night, they lie on the floor together, intertwined in a pool of swirling red and green. There is blood there, and something else, and the fluids glow differently, and the room is awash in mottled light.

"In retrospect it might have been a little hasty of you to try the same thing on me", says Rose, weakly. "The biological setup is vaguely analogous, but I've lost quite a lot of blood."

"It seemed like the thing to do at the time", Kanaya says. "And you seemed to be enjoying yourself."

"Yes. I was. I did. I can feel myself healing. It appears that paradox space is not prudish enough to deem death by sexual exuberance just." She rolls over and feels something squish under her fingers. "Although it felt pretty heroic near the end, there. It pains me to tell you this, my darling, but I'm afraid your new sash did not survive the carnage. Please try to act disappointed." She holds up the dripping remains.

"Its sacrifice was not in vain. As explorers we must be prepared to accept the occasional casualty. The rug, for example. Oh Gog, the rug..."

"And the furniture, yes."

"Next time perhaps you will allow me to put down some kind of tarpaulin or rubber sheet before we begin?"

"Perhaps."

And then they lie there, together for a time, sharing a path through an indifferent universe, for and in this moment, their companionable silence restored.

Overhead, the new moons of a new planet turn, shining. A traveler abroad at night would have little difficulty navigating beneath their tripartite beacons, particularly if he were mindful of the constellation Strider, winking in the heavenly ark, the left lens of its impossibly cool shades forever pointing due north. Such a one is the Heir of Breath, making his way home to where Roxy Lalonde awaits, with any luck wearing nothing but a smile and a glass of gin. Romance sure is weird, he thinks to himself; and wonders, idly, how long he should wait before offering to come around again to mend the furniture.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [open hand or closed fist (the interior decorating remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7588051) by [stiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction)




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